


Red Menace

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Addiction, Drug Addiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-18
Updated: 2011-05-18
Packaged: 2017-10-19 13:30:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/201376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Terezi's love of the color red goes too far.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Menace

**Author's Note:**

> Addiction is a terrible thing
> 
> (ps this is actually the first fic I've ever finished :V)

Red. Terezi always loved the color red. It had started out harmless enough, Dave supposed. He’d wear a red shirt and she’d cling to him the entire day, sometimes licking it or sniffing at it like a dog sniffs a choice ass. She’d cackle in delight whenever he drew her something in red or at random moments during their online chats.

He remembered the day Terezi discovered Heinz ketchup. He woke up to find three bottles of it opened and emptied on the kitchen counter. Terezi was laying on the floor, licking her hand like a cat, with red sauce smeared all over her face and hair. It had taken an hour to get everything cleaned up, with the troll giggling the entire time like she was high. From then on, he banned ketchup completely. Everything went downhill from there.

Before, she’d always been careful to preserve the red pieces of her chalk boxes. “Red is the best and tastes the best,” she said. “So you should only use it when you need something to be the best.” She began to use it more and more on her brick-wall murals, the bright carmine blending into the darker shade as she drew memories of youth over and over. Shitty drawings of juries and judges, crude representations of courtrooms with labels scrawled on each of the figures.

He’d asked her why she was using the red so much, one day. “Because, stupid,” she said. She seemed annoyed at him for even asking. “Red is the best and tastes the best. I want these to be the best so I use red. Duh.”

 

Two months later, she began to eat the chalk. She would slide the chalk across her outstretched tongue while staring at him until he looked away. He’d hear the first crunch, then, as those shark-teeth bit off their first chunk. Terezi would sink into a mild, giggling stupor as she nibbled and crunched until the fine powder crusted her lips. She then stared at a wall for the next few hours. It said it was non-toxic on the box but Dave suspected that didn’t necessarily apply to trolls. There was _something_ going on with the stuff.

It wasn’t all that bad, right? It’s not like Dave didn’t smoke a little of his own medicine from time to time to take the edge off. Hell, Terezi had been through a hell of a lot more than he had, so why not let her escape sometimes? It wasn’t like the powdery off-brand chalk she’d buy at night from the convenience store was all that expensive.

Dave wasn’t sure whether it was some kind of built-in resistance or what, but Terezi soon began to need more and more. She’d come home at three in the morning with her arms full of the small cardboard boxes. She’d slam the door with her foot and dump the chalk onto the kitchen counter, picking out the red ones and shoving the rest onto the floor. Ten, twelve, sometimes twenty rods of pale scarlet would be shoved past her lips en masse. The coffee grinder she passed off as a mouth made short work of them; red-tinged drool would dribble down her chin as muffled giggles escaped her red-powdered lips.

Dave watched from the doorway and said nothing. This shit was harmless, right? No reason to worry about it; this obsession probably was just some weird blind alien psycho phase. Believing that made him feel a little better.

 

In hindsight, watching Scarface probably wasn’t the best idea. Sure, she’d clapped and cheered as Tony Montana murdered and backstabbed his way to the top. (“I couldn’t watch movies when I was a wriggler,” she’d told him during a quieter scene. “I didn’t have any discs! I lived in a fucking forest!” Then she laughed far too loud.) Sure, she thought Al Pacino’s character was “cooler than you, coolkid,” which he had to admit made him scoff just a little. She just smirked at him.

 

When her giggling woke him up at four in the morning, though, he’d opened the bathroom door, prepared to yell at her to keep it down. What he found was difficult for his sleep-addled brain to parse. Terezi, wearing one of his red shirts, rolling around on the bathroom floor and giggling. Her face was covered in red dust and teal blood was slowly dribbling out of her nostril.

On the bathroom sink were the remnants of lines of carmine dust. Next to them was a scarlet-dusted plastic straw. It was too much to process. He simply shut the door, climbed back into bed, told himself he was having nightmares again, and went back to sleep.

 

He woke up in the morning to find Terezi asleep on the bathroom floor, looking very similar to what he believed was a nightmare. Dave simply stared through bleary red eyes at the troll snoring, stained with blood and powder, on the hard tiles. She’d lost weight, he noticed; she used to be almost pleasing to look at but now looked like she hadn’t eaten in weeks. Her cheeks were hollow, her eye sockets looked even shittier than before, her hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in days.

He nudged her with his toes. “Wake up. Wake the fuck up.”

Her eyes fluttered open and glanced around wildly before her head turned and centered on him. She stirred and groaned, rubbing her face vigorously as she sat up. “Hey coolkid,” she said with a grin.

He stared at her. “No. No ‘hey coolkid,’ Rezi. This shit’s gotta stop. This is fucked up. No more fucking chalk, no more fucking red.”

Terezi went from calm to angry in seconds flat. “Fuck you, Strider! You can’t fucking tell me what to do with my life. Fucking coolkid. You’ve never been cool. You’re just some dumb human who thinks he knows what’s best for Terezi fucking Pyrope! You don’t know shit! Fuck – you!” She stood up and shoved him out of the doorway and against the wall of the narrow hallway.

He remembered little after that – punches and screamed curses, falling, his head hitting something (or the other way around?), and then waking up with the worst headache of his life. Terezi was gone. He checked under his bed: so was the rent money.

“Fuck.”

 

Dave spent the next few hours trying to track her down. None of their friends had heard from her. He couldn’t exactly call the cops, either; the fuck would he even say? “Uh, yeah, I need to report a missing person. Well, she’s not really a person. She’s a space alien. She has gray skin and short, nubby cone-horns that look like candy corn. She has red eyes because she’s blind but she sees by smelling and licking things. Her teeth are like a fucking Great White shark about to bite your leg off. Oh, and she’s addicted to the color red. She snorts red chalk like it’s fucking blow.”

 

In the end, he didn’t need to call anyone. She came back home sometime in the night, with a shopping bag full of the best chalk money could buy. She had managed to find an art store or something, if the logo on the bag was any indication. She’d probably bought their entire stock of red chalk: individual pieces of deep red, each wrapped in thin plastic. Several dozen had been opened and crushed on a mirror. A couple lines remained on the mirror of what seemed like a dozen. A razor lay next to the mirror, in front of a brand new mortar and pestle.

 

Terezi lay on the floor, unmoving. Her blank red eyes seemed glazed. Two rivulets of teal blood, cracked and dried, dripped from her nose and made a puddle on the floor under her cheek. In her hand, clutched between fingers capped by red-stained orange claws, was a plastic straw.

 

Dave stood there and simply looked at her. He wasn’t sure how long, but it was long enough for the shadows to shift as the sun slid slowly across the sky. “Shit,” he said. “Shit shit shit shit shit.”

 

He sank to his knees and reached out to touch her neck. It was cool, dry, smooth and absolutely still. A shudder rain through him but no pain followed. There was only the calm numbness of disbelief and shock. Terezi had been his responsibility. He could have stopped her. He could have done something, anything – he could have been awake, waiting for her. He hadn’t.

 

Dave sat and waited for the hurting to start.

**Author's Note:**

> I think this is probably the dumbest thing I've ever written


End file.
